Sustainable alarm, unending hoax. Commentary at Germany’s ‘Die Welt’: Why has the climate-last-chance alarm been blaring 30 years long now? And why has the planet today “suddenly” just been given yet another 20 years by experts?

Remember how in 2007 Al Gore warned we had only 10 more years to act?

Well, those 10 years have long since expired, and that deadline came and went without the planet changing much. Embarrassed, global warming alarmists quietly pushed the doomsday back once again. And this time it was for real.

This game has been going on for years now.

Today, business journalist Daniel Wetzel here in a commentary at German national daily Die Welt finally is wondering why it’s been “5 to midnight for 30 years now”!

One of the most important numbers in the world goes by the catchy title of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity, or ECS. It is a measure of how much the climate responds to greenhouse gases. More formally, it is defined as the increase, in degrees Celsius, of average temperatures around the world, after doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and allowing the atmosphere and the oceans to adjust fully to the change. The reason it’s important is that it is the ultimate justification for governmental policies to fight climate change.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says ECS is likely between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, but it can’t be more precise than that. Which is too bad, because an enormous amount of public policy depends on its value. People who study the impacts of global warming have found that if ECS is low — say, less than two — then the impacts of global warming on the economy will be mostly small and, in many places, mildly beneficial.